Social media Advent calendar Day 6: Greplin

It’s pretty much a given that, as a journalist, you should be having conversations on multiple networks at any one time. But what happens when you read to refer back to a comment made by someone? The downside to real-time social conversation is that an interesting conversation can soon find itself buried by more recent events – if you can remember which network you have the conversation on.

Step forward Greplin, a tool which I was a little wary of when I first started using it because you are giving it access to a heck of a lot of stuff. But it is very, very useful. Within minutes, it’s indexed conversations on any social network – and more – than you choose to include, making it very easy to find stuff. And it indexes from a lot of places:

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Dropbox are there from the off, while others – Google Reader or Reddit, for example – come after you’ve begun reccomending other people to the service.

One of those tools which becomes very handy once you’ve started using it.